Spread My Wealth!

by Will Wilkinson on November 5, 2008

The flight of the wealthy toward the Democratic Party continues apace.

Pew shows a Dem pick-up of 8% from 2004 among voters making over 100K, making it practically a push.

Andrew Gelman adds finer graphical detail.

2. As with previous Republican candidates, McCain did better among the rich than the poor:

outcome1.png

But the pattern has changed among the highest-income categories:

outcome2.png

This last one is the stunner. After about 110K, voters in this election became less likely to vote for the ostensibly anti-”spread the wealth” candidate.

Obama also had a huge pick-up in 18-29 year-old voters. What explains all this? Here’s my conjecture, in one word: secularization.

Rich people who don’t go to church are especially socially liberal. The richer they get, the less they prioritize economic issues over social issues, as Inglehart’s “post-materialism” theory predicts. And, if I recall from recent surveys, there has been a big decline in religiosity among the young, which tends to go along with an increasingly socially liberal cast of mind. The overall effect is that the Republican Party has become too socially conservative for increasingly secular wealthy people and increasingly secular twenty-somethings. The GOP is now pretty clearly the party of the religious, white, middle-aged and elderly middle class–not a group with a shining political future. The increasing popularity of the Democrats among the rich is going to move the economic policy preference of the median Democrat “right” and the economic policy preference of the median Republican “left”. In the short term, this might make for a decrease in polarization on economic policy, which may produce bipartisan support for policies that will horrify libertarians. In the long term, the Democrats will continue to become ever more “socially liberal and fiscally conservative,” despite the attempt of the ideological left-leaning media and academic opinion elites (who are full of New New Deal ideas) to prevent this.

Andrew Gelman: I’m stealing at least half of these ideas from your book. Is this wrong?

Viewing 9 Comments

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    Well the socially liberal bit is easy to understand, but why would people who presumably understand how to make money be in favour of policies that tend to be antipathetic to the best and surest means of doing so?
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    Will,
    You seem generally willing to take seriously the point that your vote is ridiculously unlikely to matter, so why is this so shocking? With the exception of P-Diddy, I don't think many voters who make more than $100K really and truly believe that they're swinging the election.
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    Will,

    You forget from our book that the secularization effect happens in the blue/rich states much more so than the red/poor states. One of our big arguments is that politics happens differently in different places.

    But thanks for the plug! :)

    Boris Shor
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    Will,
    I've been making almost this exact argument for months, arguing, as you do, that the future of the Dem Party will make them ever more fiscally conservative, and the future of the Republican Party will make them ever more fiscally liberal. I haven't read Gelman's book, though. Anyways, the bottom line for me is that the future of libertarianism more generally lies much more with the Dems than the Republicans, with whom we have been more closely associated for decades.

    Pedro - If you have two competing priorities, and neither party adequately represents both priorities, then you have to decide which priority is more important. If you have a good amount of income, then the difference between a 35% tax and a 39% tax is not the end of the world. There is also plenty of evidence that, above a certain level, additional income has little-to-no effect on one's happiness...which is, of course, the highest priority for most people.
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    publiusendures,
    Happiness studies also say that, after 6 months or so, becoming a quadriplegic has no affect on happiness. Does this demonstrate: (a) people don't care about being quadriplegics, (b) that what people want can't be collapsed to "happiness" or (c) happiness literatures is just junk that comes from taking utility theory waaaaay too seriously [except for the part about how a utility function is only unique up to a monotonic transformation]?
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    Ryan yin: You seem to miss my point, which is simply that it is unsurprising that the prospect of a slightly higher marginal tax rate would be a comparatively low priority to someone with a particularly high income. If we were talking about a situation where their marginal tax rate was likely to increase by a tremendous amount (perhaps by 50% or more), then we could maybe expect a different result. This is not to say that no one with a particularly high income would deem this a comparatively low priority - only that it is unsurprising that a substantial number of such people would do so.
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    Only about 5% of americans have a personal income above $100,000. A 8% gain among these voters isn't as big of a deal as the 5% gain among the 95% of americans with personal income below $100,000.
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    publiusendures,
    I see the point, and I think it's reasonable (though I don't think I agree). I'm just saying that the happiness literature doesn't make your point more convincing, and also that the claim "happiness ... highest priority for most people" is provably false (at least if you define "happiness" to mean whatever it is those studies measure).

    Regarding priorities, is it in fact the case that high income people do want lower/less progressive taxes? If they simply have other priorities that trump what they actually want on economic issues, then this should show up in public opinion polls. Does it?
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    Will: Thanks for the link and the discussion. I basically agree with what you wrote (of course) except that it's always iffy to try to predict what will happen next. Also, my impression from poll data from 2004 is that, like it or not, the Republicans could gain by moving to the left economically (i.e., in favor of more regulation and government intervention). More generally, voters prefer more ideologically moderate candidates, but the electoral benefits from moderation, at least in the short term, appear to be pretty small.

    Finally, I think you might be right that the Democrats will have difficulty shaking off the support of the rich, now that they have it. The influence of upper-income Americans is not just in their votes (although that does matter in some of the richer states) but in campaign contributions and political influence felt in other ways (whether it be a news reporter or media executive with socially liberal views, or a business executive who opposes unionization).
 

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